Nature Done Wright

  This post is about the way nature is sometimes.

   The world beyond us is one large food chain, and for their size, screech owls are pretty far up it.

   As I learned with the screech cam in the past year, screech owls are likely to feed on anything smaller than they are — often with apparent gusto.

   Nonetheless, I was a bit surprised to see that the first concrete evidence of a screech owl in the neighborhood this season was a dead bird on the floor of the owl box yesterday morning  (bottom of photo).

   From the screech cam, I could not quite figure out what the object was, so I went out to the owl box, climbed a ladder and looked inside.

   It appeared to be a bird — I could tell by the skinny feet and stick-like legs. The feathers also provided a big clue for a sharp tack such as myself.

    But I wasn’t sure I wanted to poke around in the box, and I wasn’t sure I could ID the bird anyway, so I took the picture here (the bird is near the wood wall in the back), scrammed, and I called in the Celery Farm marsh warden to investigate.

  He looked at the former bird and deduced from the remains that remained that it had previously been either a hermit thrush or a fox sparrow (may it now rest in peace).

  Both the hermit thrush and the fox sparrow are fine birders’ birds, and part of me was sad to see its demise.

   But that’s the way nature operates — just as a great horned owl would happily feast on the screecher. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just the way it is.

   Postscript: Last night I activated the screech cam monitor, only to discover that the owl had returned and, depending how you look at it, either removed the incriminating evidence or the rest of his meal.

   If I had not been watching the monitor every day, I would have missed this little bit of owl behavior.

  As I said in the previous post, the discovery of the bird carcass means there’s a screecher around, he knows where the owl box is, and he knows how to hunt.

  And maybe one of these days he’ll move in and make himself at home for a long  while. 

  Post-postscript: Last year an owl moved in the day after Thanksgiving.

   I’m not saying this new owl is the world’s greatest predator, but I am grateful a turkey won’t fit through the owl-box opening.

   It would take him a month to eat all those leftovers.